Black Death

The work of a highly competent British horror director, Christopher Smith, this is a familiar tale of life in a plague-ridden, mid-14th-century England, where everyone, in the immortal phrase of Quentin Tarantino, is getting medieval on everyone else's ass by way of torture, evisceration, decapitation, crucifixion and burning at the stake.

Sean Bean, a fanatical believer, recruits novice monk Eddie Redmayne from David Warner's monastery to guide a revenge mission against a distant village that has managed to avoid the pestilence through the agency of a demonic necromancer (Dutch actress Carice van Houten). At the climax, belief and disbelief are painfully tested. It's a solemn affair, atmospherically staged on German locations, that aims for but does not achieve the Seventh Seal of approval.

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